by Scott Frost
The scent of Gabriel’s cheap aftershave drifted past me. I spun on it, but my eyes could find nothing.
Fingers brushed the side of my cheek.
I started to turn but already knew I was too late. I had moved the wrong way. He was behind me, the cold skin of one hand tightening around my throat, the other taking hold of my hand holding the gun.
“You never chose,” he whispered in my ear.
His hand tightened around my throat. I could feel the sharp edges of his fingernails biting into my skin.
“Is it true what they say about blindness? Are all your other senses exploding with stimuli? What does fear smell like? Does it get lonely in the dark?”
“Go to hell.”
“Hell is where you make it, Lieutenant. A bedroom, a kitchen, a Dumpster . . . Hospitals are particularly suited to it.”
“You’re going to die and nothing will have worked out the way you saw it, the way you wrote it in your pathetic journal. The whole world doesn’t fear you. They don’t even know your name. You’ve failed.”
His hand tightened around my throat.
“What do you know of me? . . . Nothing!” His voice quivered with anger.
“I know you.”
He took two quick breaths like an animal standing over fallen prey. He was stronger than I realized. He bent my hand holding the gun back over my shoulder and placed the barrel against his own head.
“Kill me. Squeeze the trigger, hell is waiting.”
I started to tighten my finger around the trigger, but stopped. It couldn’t be that simple, that clean. What game was he playing now?
“No,” I said.
He pulled me tightly against him and whispered in my ear, “Do you know how easy it is to take life? How willingly most people beg for it?”
I tightened my hand around the grip of the gun and pressed it hard against his temple.
“There’re three wires on the timer strapped to your daughter.”
I could feel the pulse in his neck pressing against my cheek. It was slow, barely elevated, like that of a reptile.
“Pull the correct one, she lives. Pull the wrong one, you’ve killed your own daughter.”
I pressed the gun even harder against his head.
“You want to, don’t you? You want to feel it. You want the power. We all do. . . . Kill me. . . . Put the bullet in my head. . . . I’d welcome the company.”
My finger slowly tightened on the trigger.
“I won’t play any more games. Which wire?”
He shook his head. “What kind of a mother are you?”
There it was, the one question I had no answer to.
“Tell me which wire, or—”
“You’ll kill your own child.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’ve liked being a part of your family.”
“You’re not part of my family.”
My finger slipped off the trigger.
“There’re two minutes left on the timer. . . . Now there’s less than two minutes.”
“I’ll find you,” I whispered.
I felt the muscles on his jaw tighten.
“But who will I be?”
He was smiling. “I’ll call Lacy’s princess phone with the answer when you have thirty seconds.”
His hands slipped away from my wrist and throat.
“Of course, you could shoot me as I walk away. . . . It’s up to you.”
He pressed himself against me for a moment, then slipped away. I stood frozen for a second, his words swirling around in my head. I spun around and raised my Glock. The dull field of my damaged vision shimmered like a curtain rustling in a breeze. I listened for a sound but heard none. I tested the air, searching for the sweet odor of Brut, but it was as gray and empty as my vision.
I pointed my weapon toward the darkness of the hallway and began to squeeze the trigger.
“Gabriel!” I yelled.
I aimed into the center of the soft, dark circle of the hallway.
Nothing.
I held on it for another moment, waiting for the creak of a floorboard, a shift in the pattern of light. My hand tensed, then I took a breath and lowered the Glock.
He was gone.
I held on the hallway for a moment, then turned my attention to the room.
“Lacy?”
If anything, my eyesight was getting worse. The blurry corona of sight on the borders of my vision was now filled with prisms of glaring color.
“I need you to make a sound if you can.”
I heard the faint creak of wood as if she was straining against her bindings. I reached out my hand and began to walk forward. A scent I didn’t remember smelling since she was an infant filled the air. My child’s sweet, perfect scent.
I started to rush and caught my foot on something on the floor and began to stumble. I had forgotten all about the vest over my shoulders. I reached out, expecting to fall, when instead my hand found the corner bedpost and held on. I held my breath, waiting to see if the liquid in the sensor had uncovered the wire, waiting for a flash, and then emptiness.
“Please,” I whispered as if it were a prayer and I was devout, which hadn’t been the case in more years than I could remember. Belief was easy, a form of infatuation. Faith, on the other hand, was more like love. It required trust in something there was no physical evidence of.
I took a breath. The wire was still covered.
My hand released its grip on the turned wood of the post, and I groped my way slowly around to the other side of the bed.
“Where are you, honey?” I said softly.
I swept my hand out across the bed and found the familiar touch of her denim jeans just above the knee where her legs were bound with duct tape.
I quickly ran my hands up along her slender figure until I found the small brick of explosives and the detonating device. I froze. Upon touching it, my hand began to tremble. I thought there was nothing more I could possibly learn about fear or terror, but I was wrong. It was taped and wired around her neck like a medieval collar. I tried to say something but my voice caught. I could feel her trembling with fear.
“It will be okay. I’ll get this off.”
I ran my hand along the side of her face until I found the tape that covered her mouth. A tear slid down her cheek and across my fingers. I worked my way around the edge of the tape to make sure there were no wires protruding, then I slid a fingernail under the edge until I had enough tape to pull it off. Lacy tried to speak, but sobs overwhelmed her.
“Mommy.”
I wanted to hold her, pull her to me, but I couldn’t. I brushed her hair off her forehead and caressed her.
“Get it off . . . get it off me!” she pleaded, as if it were a parasite that had attached itself to her.
“We will. But I can’t see, so you have to help me . . . okay?”
I felt her body shudder with a sob then stiffen as she weakly nodded.
“Ass . . . hole.”
“Yeah . . . fucking asshole.”
Her body heaved with another cry and then settled into a series of short, quick breaths. I placed a hand on her chest like I had done so many nights when she was a child and her lungs had filled with asthma.
“You have to slow down, okay? Just one breath, just one . . . one . . . one.”
The rhythm slowed and she began to take in air.
“That’s better. Now, I’m going to look at this, and you tell me what I’m feeling.”
“Okay,” she whispered, barely managing even that.
I ran my hands down to the device. Tape covered most of it, but I found the square shape of what must have been the timing device. Two wires ran out of one side, one on the other.
“Can you see this?”
Her breathing began to quicken again.
“Slow down. Try to tell me what I’m holding.”
“I can’t see it. . . .” She tried to say more but couldn’t.
“Okay, it’s okay. I foun
d the wires. That’s all that matters.”
“What is that?”
I felt her eyes on me, staring at the bomb strapped to me.
“That’s nothing to worry about.”
“It’s another bomb. . . . Oh God.”
She began to tremble and I lied.
“It’s been taken care of. We have to worry about you, that’s all. Okay?”
The phone began to ring in Lacy’s room.
“Oh God, oh God. Hurry . . . Hurry.”
Lacy’s voice was on the edge of panic. I started toward the hallway as fast as my vision allowed. He had said he would call with thirty seconds left. My hand followed along the dresser until I found the doorway. The flashes of light at the edges of my vision made it more difficult to walk and keep my balance, so I closed my eyes and ran my hand against the wall until I found Lacy’s door.
The phone was across the room on the other side of the bed. I steered around the TV that was in the middle of the room. My foot hung up in her dress on the floor, and I dragged it until it caught on the foot of the bed.
No, no, no.
I kicked my leg and heard the tearing of fabric as I pulled free.
How many seconds had passed? Too many, slipping away, and I could do nothing about it.
I rushed around the bed and reached for the phone. My hand hit it with a jolt, and it slid from my grasp and fell off the bed table onto the floor. I started to bend down and then realized I would uncover the detonation wire in the motion detector if I did that. I dropped straight down to my knees and searched the floor until my hand found the cord and then the receiver.
“Which one?”
“You should have about twenty seconds,” Gabriel said.
“Which one?”
“The blue one.”
“The blue—I’m blind!”
“I know. . . . Good-bye, Lieutenant. Fifteen seconds.”
I dropped the phone and rushed across the room to Lacy’s dresser. She kept a hand mirror on it—had bought it as part of her transformation into a beauty pageant contestant. If it was still there . . .
I swept my hand across the top of the dresser, knocking aside the other props she had acquired for her role, until I found the smooth surface of a ten-inch hand mirror. I blindly rushed out of the room and down the hall toward my bedroom.
The seconds ticked away in my head. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.
In the darkness I felt myself approaching the edge of an abyss.
I hit the bed hard with my knee, and then my hand found her leg. Through my blindness I tried to position the mirror to reflect the device where Lacy could see it.
“Which of the wires is blue?”
“I can’t—” she shouted like a person in free fall, trying to be heard over the rush of air.
“Just tell me. It’s all right.”
“I can’t see it—the wrong side, turn it around!”
I spun the mirror in my hand.
“Tilt it up.”
I twisted it in my hand.
She shuddered and cried.
“Lacy, which one is blue?”
Ten, nine . . .
“Oh, God.”
“Lacy!”
Her voice carried the sound of defeat.
“They’re all fucking blue.”
I felt her body heave as terror took control of her. I dropped the mirror and fumbled in my darkness until I had the three wires in my fingers.
Which one?
I tried picturing Harrison and how he would interpret each wire’s function. Which was the ground, which was the trigger, which was the . . . I was clueless.
Eight . . . seven . . .
In the dark I heard Lacy hyperventilating.
Think. Work it. There was something there. The blue one, what about it?
Six . . . five . . .
“Mommm!” Lacy cried. “No . . . no.”
I tried to run it through my head. How would Gabriel do it? How would he play this? His greatest role wasn’t as a terrorist, it was as the victim Philippe, sitting with a bomb in his lap, looking at me as Harrison dismantled the timer. There was laughter in those eyes. The player. Nothing was real for him. We had him in our hands, but we didn’t know it. It was a game to him. A deadly carny trick. Three wires, all blue . . . Choose.
Four . . . three . . .
In the distance I heard the shrill sound of sirens heading in our direction. I gripped the wires in my hand.
“I don’t want to die,” Lacy cried.
Two . . .
“I love you, sweetheart.”
I closed my eyes against the confusion of my damaged sight. I saw Lacy in a yellow dress, running toward me with her arms outstretched. She was ten years old, then five, then . . . She was calling my name, holding something in her hands to share with me. A discovery, a mystery. A gift.
“The blue one,” I whispered.
One . . .
The room seemed to empty of all sound, even those of memory. I tightened my grip, then pulled all three wires at once.
One . . . one . . . one . . .
I waited for the blinding flash of ignition. An instant of searing heat before death overtook us. Nothing. One second passed, then another and another in silence. Was this just another twist in Gabriel’s play? A few seconds of relief and hope as the delayed fuse ticked down? By pulling the three wires had I sealed our fate, or saved it? Which was it? How could I know. Or was this the genius psychopath perpetrating one more cruel joke on his lab mice. My fear no longer belonged to me, it was his to do with what he wanted.
“I think it’s over,” I said.
“What’s that sound?” Lacy whispered.
“I don’t—”
Then I heard a high-pitched whistle of rushing air.
“Can you tell where that’s coming from?”
“It—Oh, God!” Lacy cried.
“Where is it?”
“On the bomb, get it off, get it off.”
The whistle of rushing air grew louder.
“No!” Lacy screamed.
I reached out and felt the skin of a balloon rising out of the device around her neck. A child’s toy, growing bigger and bigger like some final, terrible joke that sets off the device when it bursts. I put both hands over it to try to force the air back out of it, but the balloon continued to grow, the whistle of air getting louder and louder.
Lacy’s breathing began to cycle out of control. She was trying to say something but couldn’t get enough air. The balloon began to press tight against my hands, and then to stretch to the breaking point.
“We’re not your playthings,” I yelled.
I felt the bed shudder as Lacy began to shake uncontrollably.
“No,” I started to say. And then I started to scream, “You son of a bitch!”
The sharp bang of the balloon filled the room for a deafening instant and then it was silent. A horrible, expectant silence. I took a breath, then another, and braced myself for the second and final blast that would end it.
Nothing happened.
A faint odor of latex hung in the air. Pieces of the balloon clung to my wrist like strips of skin tissue. I counted to five, and then to ten just to be sure that it was really over. Nothing else happened.
Gabriel’s play was over. His final act, the bursting of a balloon, a reminder that everything he touched, even a toy, was filled with terror. Were we alive because I had chosen correctly? Or because he had chosen for us. There was no way to know, any more than there was to understand where he had come from, or what had made him what he was.
I reached out for my daughter until I found her and cradled her in my arms. Lacy began to cry with relief and shake as if she were cold.
“Assho—” she began to say, but the word disappeared into another cycle of sobs.
I touched the soft skin of her face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “He can’t hurt us anymore.”
The muscles of her shoulders tensed and she shook her head.
>
“There’s something dripping from that glass thing on your chest.”
I reached up and touched the motion detector. A thick drop of mercury rolled down my finger and across the palm of my hand.
“Oh, God, that’s bad, isn’t it,” Lacy said, her voice beginning to tremble again.
I tried to tell her that it wasn’t, but my voice faltered. I tried to take a breath but the vest seemed to fight the air I was trying to take in. I reached out and touched Lacy’s cheek and then pulled away.
“Don’t leave me here.”
“I have to—”
“No!” she pleaded. “Don’t leave me!”
I felt another drop of mercury seep out of the cracked glass of the motion detector as I rose from the bed. I was the only danger to her now. I was the only thing that could harm her.
“I have to go into the other room.”
“No, stay with me.”
I moved toward the door and Lacy began to cry. “Mom.”
“I love you,” I said.
“No!” she yelled.
“It’s going to be fine.”
“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.”
“I have . . .”
The words slipped silently away from me as I turned my back on my daughter and started toward the dark shape of the hallway.
“Mom!” Lacy screamed. “Don’t leave me . . . don’t . . . don’t.”
My hand found the door frame to the hallway and I guided myself away from the bedroom as quickly as I could. Lacy screamed for me again and then all I heard was her faint cries. My fingers passed over the family photographs on the wall as I moved toward the dull light of the living room. I tried to remember how big a blast area Harrison had estimated the charge would destroy. How far did I have to be away from my daughter to know she was safe? Ten feet, or was it twenty? How many walls did I need between us? I passed Lacy’s bedroom and stepped into the living room. After the darkness of the hallway the light filtering in through the windows was like looking into a blinding sun. The sharp odor of explosive still filled the room.
“Harrison!”
Nothing came back.
“I need your help,” I pleaded.
Still silence. I took a step toward the dining room, where I had seen him disappear into the flash of the first explosion. The floor was littered with pieces of china from the cabinets in the kitchen. I took one step, then another, each one like walking on a shattered pane of glass. For an instant I thought I smelled the scent of Gabriel’s aftershave, but just as quickly it seemed to vanish. I started to reach for my Glock and realized I had left it in the bedroom, and then a hand took hold of my leg.
